Weaving Business Processes and Rules: A Petri Net Approach

The emerging service-oriented computing paradigm advocatesbuilding distributed information systems by chaining reusable servicesinstead of by programming from scratch. To do so, not only businessprocesses, but also business rules, policies and constraints need tobe encoded in a process language such as Web Services Business ProcessExecution Language (WS-BPEL). Unfortunately, the intermixingof business processes and rules in a single process weakens the modularityand adaptability of the systems. In this paper, we propose a formalapproach to model the weaving of business processes and rules, followingthe aspect-oriented principle. In particular, we use Predicate/Transition(PrT) nets to model business processes and business rules, and thenweave them into a coherent PrT net. The resulting woven nets are readyfor analysing system properties and simulating system behaviour.